Why we do this.

Long time, no hear

Hi, everyone. Many thanks to
those of you who have asked after me. I appreciate being missed. Nothing dire
is happening, but there is a lot of chaos both at home and at work. My son will
be graduating high school a year early, and there are a lot of preparations
toward that end going on. I also had another cancer treatment. A fairly common
but definitely not hoped for result of thyroid cancer is recurrence. The body
scan after last treatment was clear; bloodwork in six months and another scan
next fall.

The Midwest is not unlike
other regions and has been affected by the current economic
crisis. We lost a major manufacturer here due to a direct hit from a tornado,
then two others closed up shop. Literally thousands of people are out of work in
our tri-county area. The unemployment offices are swamped and people are being
sent to the library with little or no guidance.

These former factory workers,
some with limited English language skills, and very few computer skills, must
use the internet to file for unemployment, get entered in our state’s required
database and post a resume. I consider myself fairly computer savvy and this is
a cranky, confusing and unfriendly interface.

Many of our patrons do not
know how to type and do not understand why they need an email address, much
less how to establish one. Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, as well as the
larger employers in our area, all require applications to be filled out online.
People who can’t even speak English well are required to make resumes without
knowing how to say the word (“my rezoom” is how one patron referred to it),
much less fill in the form with properly capitalized names. One man did not
know what a capital letter was.

They must locate employer
websites, make a user name and password, find a job opening and find the
application. They must fill it in, make an email address and resume, and learn
to upload, attach or cut and paste it.

Our computer facilities are
maxed out. Before this summer, a five or ten minute wait was the most patrons
could expect. There are now often 25 people in line with a 30-40 minute wait.

Most of our patrons have no
other resources and are rising to the occasion. There is some impatience,
especially with children who play games and use MySpace and other social
networking sites. So far, for us, a user is a user, and everyone is entitled to
their first hour uninterrupted, and their second hour if they get back in the
wait list.

Meanwhile, because of state
tax issues, the library has had a hiring freeze since May. No one has been laid
off, but because of staff losses due to attrition and no replacements hired,
most departments are down to bare bones. We are still offering our most popular
public computer classes, but most programming has ceased. Our main priorities
are staffing the desks, giving great customer service and maintaining our
excellent collection. Public opinion of the library remains high.

The true reference question
is ever more rare, and so are the stories that I used to tell here. Most of my
transactions are now just that: tech oriented and business related. There is no
doubt they are important and valued, but there is not the emotional content
attached to them. People’s priorities and energies are focused on survival:
getting a job in order to eat and have a place to live.

So that’s the news from Lake
Woebegone, as Garrison Keillor says, where the women are strong and the men are
good-looking. The librarians? They’re still feeling pretty good.

Comments

Nice to have you back! love your site! Don’t know if you know of this, but the granddaddy of all librarian gift sources (for women) is welldressedreader.com. (I thought you might like a source for personal gifts.) If you want something that is truly custom, that’s the place. I’m a librarian in New York, and that’s where I go to get my book-loving friends gifts. I wanted to tell you about this site because they're nice people and they support CF research with sales proceeds. Can you help?

I'm so glad to see this post, as your blog is one I turn to in my tough times as a librarian. I was afraid you'd maybe stopped blogging. (Hiatus for Life Reasons is perfectly understandable! Bless you.)

I must say that your situation is only slightly more drastic than ours, and I expect ours to become worse as more layoffs hit the local area. However, knowing that I am not the only one out there helping the unemployed tide that flows through my doors is sometimes all I need to keep going.

So thank you, FGL, for sharing the little bits of your life, even if they aren't as feel-good as they used to be. They still help.

Some blog recently discussed, "Why do we need libraries any more" and it is great to hear from you folks who are in the trenches, providing not only valuable, and I'm sure, valued, services, but are also giving answerss to the above question.
Many thanks. eek

Thank you for posting and as a teen librarian thank you for maintaining your "user is a user" policy. Access at libraries for teens now will help ensure that the next generation of adults will have the skills to fill out those forms by themselves. Many of our young people would not have access to computers otherwise.